Al-Salam Mosque is a chill, bare room that begs to go unnoticed. Street light dimly filters through the thick layers of blue paint and grime that coat all four windows. Sound echoes off the barren walls, and the ceiling leaks so badly that buckets must be placed strategically when it rains. The only furniture is a single high-backed wooden chair, a place of honor for such spiritual leaders as Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman. For most of its eight years, the cavernous mosque on the third floor of a white brick building along Jersey City's Kennedy Boulevard has attracted scant interest. "We are a peaceful people; we come here to pray," explains Mohammed Nagib, the spokesman for the mosque's 300 Sunni worshippers. "We do not bother anybody." But last week the mosque was the focus of international scrutiny when federal agents arrested one of its occasional congregants, Mohammed Salameh, in connection with the World Trade Center bombing.
So far, there is nothing to connect Sheik Omar to the deadly blast. No motive. No material evidence. But he has a reputation as one of Egypt's most prominent and radical fundamentalist leaders -- a fiery voice of Islamic holy war who exhorts the faithful to their "religious duty," including the use of violence if necessary. That fame, coupled with suspicions -- but again, no concrete evidence -- of his complicity in a series of murders, has made the blind Muslim cleric a subject of the ongoing investigation.
The day after Salameh's arrest, Sheik Omar, who has been living on and off in New Jersey since 1990, placed a phone call from Detroit to the New York- based National Council on Islamic Affairs to denounce the bombing. "The holy Koran commands the faithful not to commit aggression," he said. "The bombing of the World Trade Center could not have been done by a true Muslim."
Though Sheik Omar, 55, has never been convicted of violence himself, he has been accused of giving religious approval for bloodshed. He was arrested, imprisoned, then acquitted, for encouraging the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. U.S. and Egyptian officials suspect him of issuing fatwas, or religious decrees, in the 1990 Manhattan slaying of Jewish militant Rabbi Meir Kahane and the 1992 Brooklyn murder of an Egyptian named Mustafa Shalabi. Egyptian security officials claim they have evidence that his teachings inspired the murder of antifundamentalist writer Farag Foda, who was killed in Egypt last June.
Cairo officials also blame Sheik Omar and his 10,000 hard-core disciples in Egypt for 20 attacks against tourist targets. The most recent, a TNT explosion that ripped through Cairo's Wadi el-Nil cafe, came just 75 minutes after the Trade Center explosion, and investigators are looking into a possible connection. Four people were killed in the Cairo blast, including a Swede and a Turk. Two Americans and a Canadian were among the 18 people injured.